The Difficulty of Habit…

I am cursed with laziness.  I think it may be a product of my time.  There are so many things in the modern era that keep us so distracted and glued to one place.  The television is great at doing this.  I have a television in my room which I watch before I go to bed and in the morning before I get out of bed.  It has so much control over my life that I actually set the television to go off in the morning as a second alarm clock just in case the first one does not go off. 

I also have a Sony Playstation 2, my wife reluctantly bought for me.  My favorite game at the moment is World Cup Soccer ‘08 which takes up large amounts of time when I play.  I usually play to win cups.  To win a cup, you have to play several games to do so.  And once you get started on a roll, you usually have a irresistible urge to continue on your winning streak.  This is also true with the other games you can by for this system.  God knows what might happen if there were two people in our house liked to play the game.

Finally, I have the computer.  It was up until recently that all I liked to do on the computer was to surf the websites looking for free stuff, free music, freeware, free desktop images.  I read up on bands, perhaps looked up the odd map.  But it can be addictive as well.

When I was in college, I was required to ride a bike or walk everywhere I needed to go.  The college was a few miles from where I lived. Where I worked was a few miles from where I lived as well.  This daily exercising was great for my body.  I was never thinner.   In fact, my in-laws at that time had a nickname for me, Soup Bone.  After I graduated from college, I no longer needed to bike or walk, I lost the benefit of this exercise.

About seven years ago, when I lived in apartment who had installed a gym, I tried working out on a daily basis.  I ran on a treadmill or rode a bike everyday.  I did weights everyday.  I liked it because it kept me active.  Interestingly enough, people noticed a change in me, asked me if I was working out.  I liked working out too, the way that it made your muscles ache in a good way.  The way that a good soak in a bath or a shower afterwards may your body tingle.  I always like flexing my calf muscles, its hardness impressing me.

And then, I caught something, the crud, a cold.  I am not sure what you would call it.  However, this put a halt to my exercise regime.  Even after I recovered, I was not able to get back on the exercise bike or the treadmill.  The allure to exercising was not there anymore.  I was tapped.    Even when I tried to go to the well, I could not muster up the interest to go downstairs to exercise.  I am no longer living at that apartment complex and that opportunity has passed me by. 

I have looked at exercise bikes and tread mills.  Honestly, they are not as expense as you would think they would be.  The real problem is the space.  That, and I would want to use it on my own terms, i.e., watching television.  I don’t think my wife wants an exercise bike in the middle of her living room, and, certainly don’t think we are going to drop money into a new television at this point. 

Both she and I have nice bikes sitting in our garage which we keep saying we need to get refurbished.  But as the saying goes, saying and doing are two different things.  Besides, I don’t think I could handle the gawkers watching me, a large man on a skinny bike riding through the city.  There is a walking path locally at the park which I have thought might be a good place to run.  But I have not gotten the motivation to go run it.  In short, I have the horse ready to ride but am unwilling to get on.

This is the story of all my good habits.  I have dedicated time to do something, and have done it substantially, and, then, when things get tough or I suffer a setback, I stop never to return to it.  I can’t tell you how many novels or short stories I have started only to leave them abandoned.  I have tried to start a blog like three or four times; somewhere out in the internet, there is dead pages of my lingering like ghosts between electronic impulses. 

As I am writing this, I am thinking how hard it was for me to even think of writing the blog today.  I had turned the computer on and started up the blogging program.  However, the well was dry.  However, I am bound and determined to continue, a blog a day, not only as goal to blog everyday, but an exercise of keeping with the good habits.